Those in Peril (2 page)

‘Why should
they
get involved in this stupid war? They'd be crazy.'

‘I think they will, in the end.' He pocketed his lighter. ‘I came to tell you that I'm planning to get out.'

‘Whatever for? You should be safe enough where you are. I doubt the Germans will bother much with Brittany.'

‘They will. There are too many useful harbours.'

‘So . . . where else would you go?'

‘To England.'

‘
England!
Whatever for? Switzerland would be a far better choice. The Boche will have England next on their list and the British army is on its knees – what little is left of it. The Germans will only need to walk in.'

‘Swim in,' he corrected. ‘That's not so easy. Tanks don't float very well.'

‘They'll manage it. Nothing and no-one is capable of stopping them. We may as well accustom ourselves to the idea. But they'd leave you alone at your age, Louis.'

‘Do you think they'll leave
you
alone?'

‘They're not all savages. I'm staying put. I have my business to consider.'

‘Is it worth it?'

‘Of course it is. I've spent years building it up and I've been making a good profit. I'm not just walking away.'

He thought of the smart little boutique in the Avenue Victor Hugo and of the deserted streets and shuttered shops that he had seen. ‘Who is going to be buying expensive handbags and scarves, I wonder?'

‘The Germans. For their wives and girlfriends. Perhaps they'll want to buy your paintings. One must be practical. If we are to be occupied by them, then somehow we must survive.'

He said slowly, ‘I don't believe that things will be quite so simple. France is going to be made to suffer under the Nazis. Suffer badly. I think you should come with me.'

She stared at him. ‘Come with you? To England? I hate the place! You know that very well. And it's going to be invaded too, so what's the point? I'd far sooner spend the war here in Paris, thank you. You go, if you want.
If
you can get there. They say it's almost impossible to get on a boat now.'

‘I'm taking my own.'

‘Your own?'

‘A small motorboat I've had for a while. It's been useful for getting around the coast, finding places to paint.'

‘How small?'

‘Eight metres or so.'

She burst out laughing. ‘Do you seriously expect me to go with you in some little tub like that?'

‘It's quite a reliable little tub,' he said mildly.

‘It will need to be. It's a long way across to England and you're no sailor.' She shook her head. ‘You're completely mad, Louis.
Mad!
It's a stupid risk and for no point. You'd do far better to stay here and get on with your painting. It's all you care about. All you've
ever
cared about, let's face it.'

‘Not entirely,' he said. Once he had cared a great deal for her. ‘I'd like to do something more useful – in the circumstances.'

‘What, for example?'

‘I don't know – yet.'

‘Well, you're too old for the military – they wouldn't take you.'

He gave a mock bow. ‘Thank you for reminding me, Simone. In any case, it seems there would be little point. Our army is apparently giving up the unequal struggle. And I've no desire to end up in a labour camp either. Still, at fifty-three I don't feel like retiring completely from the front line of life.'

‘If you're sensible, you'll do nothing. Just stay out of trouble.'

‘Sound advice, certainly. I'll try to remember it. I can't persuade you, then?'

‘To come to England with you? No, thank you. Absolutely not.'

He finished the Pernod. ‘I'll make arrangements with the bank for the monthly payments to be made to you, as usual. There shouldn't be a problem.'

She tilted her head. ‘You've been doing rather well, I gather, Louis. Getting quite well known at last. I stopped by Gerard's gallery the other day and he was singing your praises. He says your paintings sell well, and to some rather important people. But I doubt if they'll appreciate you the same in England. The English don't like us, any more than we like them, and they're philistines. You'd do far better to stay put.'

‘Personally, I don't much like the idea of selling my work to the Nazis.'

‘Well, you never were very practical. Another Pernod? Did you eat lunch? I can cook something for you, if you like? There's no great rush surely?'

She had moved deliberately closer. If he stayed, they would certainly end up passing a very agreeable afternoon. Whatever differences they might have had, they had not been of the marriage bed. For a moment he was tempted, as he had been on several other occasions when they'd met over the years. She was still his wife, after all. He stubbed out his cigarette. ‘I have to get back, Simone. There's lots to do.' He bent to kiss her cheek. ‘I'll try to let you know where I am. Look after yourself.'

She shrugged, moving away. ‘I always do.' She saw him out. ‘Good luck, Louis.'

As he passed the glass door downstairs, the concierge emerged. ‘You're leaving already, monsieur?'

‘Evidently, madame.'

‘Shall we see you again soon?'

‘I doubt it,' he said. ‘My regards to Monsieur Bertrand and his liver.'

He called at several banks, trying to get francs changed into English sterling, but without success. The cashiers all regretted that there was none to be had. The crowds outside the Gare Montparnasse were even worse than before, filling the Place de Rennes. When he finally forged a way inside the station, the bad situation became chaotic as people fought like animals to get on board the trains. Alone and without luggage, he was able to squeeze himself into a carriage where there was space, at least, to stand. He closed his eyes and ears to the pandemonium and panic around him – women weeping, children howling, babies screaming.

Simone would probably be all right. He certainly hoped so. One could not be married to a woman for more than thirty years and not feel some concern for her, even if the last fifteen of them had been spent apart. In the beginning he had felt a great deal more than concern for her, but that had been long, long ago. He was hard put now to remember how it had been when they had first met in Paris – to recapture the feeling of being young and wildly in love. He had been a penniless art student of twenty-one and she had been a year older and working in the Galeries Lafayette on the glove counter. She had sat down at the next table in a café and he had asked to borrow her newspaper. Naturally, it had been an excuse. They had been married within a year and lived happily in terrible lodgings on almost no money – but not, unfortunately, happily ever after.

Reasonably enough, she had wanted him to get a proper job too and not spend his days painting pictures that never sold. To please her, he had found work in an advertising agency, which he had hated. The First World War had begun and he had volunteered to serve in the army, largely to escape the advertising agency. Instead of dying in the trenches, along with the hundreds of thousands of others, he had been invalided out with a leg wound that still gave him trouble at times. By the end of the war Simone's mother had died and they had moved into the rue de Monceau apartment. Simone had become pregnant but miscarried at five months and never conceived again. With her inheritance she had opened a small boutique and he had gone back to painting.

As time passed, he had begun to sell some of his work but, by then, he and Simone had grown apart – she occupied with her boutique, he with his painting. He had moved out of the apartment and lived for a while in Provence, painting whatever pleased him. Later he had spent some time in England in St Ives in Cornwall, doing the same thing. Then he had travelled some more – Italy, Greece, Turkey and across the Atlantic to the eastern seaboard of America – Maine and Massachusetts. Finally, he had returned to France and rented the studio in Pont-Aven on the south coast of Brittany. Simone had stayed put in the Paris apartment and she had opened a bigger and better boutique in the Avenue Victor Hugo. Since they were both Roman Catholics there had never been any question of a divorce; not that he had set foot inside a church for many years, but Simone went to Mass regularly. Neither had interfered in the other's life and there had been no shortage of women in his or of men in hers. It was what might be called a very civilized arrangement.

In Pont-Aven he paid a visit to his bank. As a favour, the manager unearthed a few English pound notes for him.

‘You are proposing to go to England, monsieur?'

‘No, but one never knows what currency will come in useful these days.'

‘Very true. Though American dollars would be safer.'

He went to buy some more paints and canvases. The art shop was empty of customers, its owner deeply depressed. ‘Nobody has been in here for three days, monsieur. If things go on like this, I shall be ruined.'

Back at the apartment, he packed a suitcase. His paintings were stacked around the walls of the studio. He went through them, as a farewell gesture, and came across the portrait he had done years ago of Simone when he had been in love with her and which she had disliked, thinking it made her look fat. He held it up for a moment, admiring a good-looking young woman with dark brown eyes, a retroussé nose, soft hair and a rather hard mouth. But the magic that she had once held for him had gone.

He did a little more work on the painting of the quayside and then cleaned his brushes before going in search of Mademoiselle Citron in her rooms on the ground floor. She opened her door, unsmiling. The grudge of his rejection was always there.

‘I'm going away in the morning,' he told her, ‘but I want to keep the studio on.' He produced an envelope from his pocket. ‘Here is six months' rent in advance.'

She lifted the flap of the envelope and took a lightning glance at its contents – it was all she needed to gauge the sum precisely. ‘Very well, monsieur. I will reserve it for you. Where will you be going?'

‘To friends, in the south.'

She nodded. ‘It may be safer there. You are wise. God knows what is going to happen to us all. But supposing you do not return, monsieur, what shall I do then? I can't keep the rooms for nothing.'

‘I have arranged with the bank to pay you another instalment at the end of the six months – if I am not back.' That satisfied her all right. He went on, ‘I shall leave the studio locked. Everything is to be left exactly as it is. Nothing is to be moved or disturbed in my absence.'

‘As you wish, monsieur.'

He knew that she had a key and would certainly poke and pry into everything once he had gone, but there was nothing he could do about it. Her excuse, whenever he had raised the subject, was that the place needed cleaning – which was certainly true enough since he never bothered to do much himself. He said pleasantly, ‘Perhaps you could give me a receipt for the six months' rent, mademoiselle.'

‘Certainly, monsieur.'

He ate at the bistro,
Chez Alphonse
, in the rue du port, where he was a regular – a modest place with steamy windows and a smell of garlic, herbs, coffee, caporal tobacco, its walls proudly decorated with prints of paintings by once-local artists: Paul Gauguin's
Breton Girls Dancing, Christmas Night, The Young Christian Girl, Christ Jaune
with his three Marys resembling farmers' wives, Paul Sérusier's cutout-like Breton women wearing their peasant shawls, Emile Bernard's panoramic vista of the town bridge from the Bois d'Amour. The original colours were all dulled by grease, nicotine and time. As Louis was finishing an excellent onion soup, Alphonse came to his table. He was a small, thin man and his clothes – a white apron tied over black – were as much a part of him as another skin. He sat down to join him in a glass of wine, shoulders slumped, moustaches drooping – the picture of dejection. ‘People are leaving. People are arriving. Nobody knows what to do or where to go. Me, I have to stay where I am. This is my living. All I have. I'm too old to start all over again somewhere else. What of you, monsieur?'

‘I'm thinking of getting out.'

‘Well, there is nothing to keep you here, I suppose. You can paint anywhere, isn't that so? You're lucky. Who knows what the Germans will do when they get here? We could all be put against a wall and shot. It wouldn't surprise me. They are capable of anything. Yes, I think you would be wise to leave. What about your studio?'

‘I'm keeping it on, in case I want to come back.'

‘Will you take your car?'

‘No. The tank is only half full. And who knows if I could get more petrol.'

‘What about your boat?'

The less he said to anybody, the better. ‘I'll probably sell it.'

Alphonse nodded gloomily. ‘If you don't, the Boche will take it.'

From the bistro he went to the boat which he kept moored at a quiet part of the quay. The
Gannet
had certainly seen better days and, in places, her blue paint had peeled down to the wood. But she was seaworthy, with an engine that usually worked and a small wheelhouse that sheltered him from the worst of the weather. He checked the preparations he had already made: the compass, the full reservoir of petrol, the spare drums, the hand-torch and batteries, the drinking water, the tin of biscuits, the smoked sausage and ham, the round of Camembert, the cigarettes, the bottles of wine and one of brandy – not forgetting a corkscrew.

He unrolled the chart, smoothing it down with the flat of his hand while he studied it once again. Down the river to Port-Manech at the mouth of the estuary. Hug the coastline as far as the Pointe de Trévignon and then cut straight across to the Pointe de Penmarch, where he would alter course to go north-west across the Baie d'Audierne towards the Pointe du Raz – the most perilous part of the voyage. He would have to time it very carefully so as not to be caught there with the wind over tide when the seas would boil up into a seething white cauldron. On across the Douarnenez Bay towards the port of Brest and then, from there on, due north for England where the wind would be behind him. If he could make a steady five to six knots, he could reach Falmouth within roughly forty-eight hours. But it was a far cry from the kind of gentle pottering around up and down the coast that he usually did. He wondered if he, and the boat, were up to it.